How Deep is Your Well?

A day best slept through than lived. You can only understand that if you've ever been truly depressed. Made myself shower. It had been a week since I'd washed my hair. Made myself refill my pill boxes and take my morning meds. It'd been three days.

I confessed to my therapist that I hadn't been med compliant. And she asked me why, which is a reasonable question, and I surprised myself by saying, "It's not really intentional. Last week, I was so high I didn't think I needed them. And then when I crashed, I couldn't be bothered to care."

There's a lot of that last lately. Can't be bothered to eat. Can't be bothered to care about food, groceries, money, bills, pills. As if they will all, somehow, magically take care of themselves. Don't care about my hygiene, how the apartment looks, if I'm able to get anything done.

I've started having the gas mask fantasy again.

Slippery Slope

I'm heading for a depression. I can feel it coming on. I've lost interest in most everything again: reading, computer games, movies, sex, going places, doing things. I am angry at myself about this, so I'm cranky all the time and restless. Sometimes, instead, I'm listless and passive. The IBS and GERDs is acting up as well. I'm beginning to stress about things like Jb coming home at night. While other things, I don't care about at all: like whether the bills get paid, whether we have money or not, whether we have food or not. When Jb tries to ask me about these things, I get annoyed, short with him. He is constantly yelling at me for snapping at him. My temper and patience are nonexistent. I resent Jb's intrusion into my "world." More and more, he says things to me like, "You know, maybe you should try living here in reality, like everybody else."

This morning, on waking, I remember having a very vivid dream about living in a city with Hitler and being somehow close to him. Because he's a despot and mercurial of mood, everyone is always on eggshells around him, not wanting to curry his disfavor. I am someone he favors, and even I am very careful about what I do and say. It is stressful, this living on the edge, never knowing whether he'll be kind or cruel. And he can be very kind, as well as very cruel. There is a small resistance in the town. They know each other by the books they read. But those loyal to Hitler know them by the books they read as well. I try to sneak past a Hitler supporter with one of these books tucked among many. I make it, barely, out to a terraced park full of students and wildflowers, and there are two women who oversee the whole body of supporters. L-----, from the psych ward, is there in my dream. She screams out at a line of nuns who walk past the park; she was always screaming out about freedom and being closed in.

The dream is telling. I am having a hard time dealing with being home all day, then having Jb come home and disrupt my little world. It's like Jayne says in Firefly, "[He] damages my calm." It also sends me back to my childhood--when I lived in fear of my mother's moods, never knowing what they might be from minute to minute. I have to admit to myself that I've felt this way for the last year or so. Even when Jb was picking me up from work, the last hour of work, before I knew he was coming, I'd start to get sick to my stomach, I'd taste cigarettes in my mouth, and my IBS would suddenly flare up, so that I missed almost a half hour of work at the end of the day, every day. I think, perhaps, this is an inability to deal with change on a small, localized scale. And like in my dream, I used to escape into books. But since the hospitalization, I've had trouble concentrating enough to read them, except in small snippets.

Jb also gets on my ass--understandably so--about not having started to unpack. I took a week off because I needed it after the move, but I've no energy for it. It's been up near the 100s this week, so I tell myself it's because it's been so hot and I've been trying to keep the A/C off during the day. But the truth is that I simply don't have the motivation to do it. And Jb's losing patience with me. We had another fight last night. He told me that I've ruined every night so far in the new apartment, that I no longer participate in our relationship. And I'm left hurt and shamed and guilty and small--and angry at him for making me face the truth. I wish, sometimes, I could not listen. That I could wrap the bubble of my quiet day alone around me.

I cannot blame Jb, though. He is working hard, for both of us. He has every right to resent what he must see as my laziness. And it's like work all over again. How many times can you say, "I don't feel well," before they begin to look at you askance, like you're lying, or making it up. Depression isn't an excuse, but it comes across as one. Unless you've been there, deep and alone, you cannot ever truly understand what it feels like. Mild depression is not the same as major depression. Trying to follow each mood swing is exhausting. Depression is depleting. You are told, expected, to be this or that, but you can't be. Part of you no longer even cares that you can't be. Another part of you is angry and bitter, guilt-ridden and ashamed. And still, even though you want to meet someone's expectations, you can't. The will to try sputters and flags like a flame about to go out, and you're left feeling helpless, and you know it's all you're fault. You are the one who is broken. You are the one who is wrong.

8:10 a.m. Meds Check

Saw the psych doctor on Monday, the day after the move. Told the psych nurse practitioner that I had been feeling depressed, wishing I were back in the hospital, thinking bad thoughts, but not to the point of having a plan. Just the beginnings of them. I was crying more, acting out and difficult to handle, and not interested in much, despite the obvious need to pack and move. I told her that I know change is a trigger for me, and that I usually go depressed afterward. I'm still sleeping a ton. So she tweaked my meds and actually put me on an antidepressant along with the sleep aid and mood stabilizer. Why I wasn't on one before this, I've no idea. There was also talk of raising my Lamictal because of the anger and irritability, but we never settled on a dosage.

Here's my new list of psych meds:
Wellbutrin XL 150 MG 1x a day (antidepressant)
Lamictal 100 MG 2x a day (mood stabilizer)
Remeron 30 MG 1x a day (sleep aid/sort of an antidepressant; up from 15 MG)
Klonopin 1 MG 2x a day (anti-anxiety)

Other meds:
Benicar HCT 40/25 MG 1x a day (blood pressure)
Protonix 40 MG 1x a day, as needed (gastro-intestinal pain)
Levsinex .375 TIMECP 2x a day (abdominal pain/IBS symptoms)

Add to that the 2 Tylenol or Ibuprofen I've been taking for my left knee (osteo-arthritis is acting up with all the rain and change of seasons), and I'm starting to feel like I need a day-of-the week pill box with separate day and night chambers. Not to mention that you'd think someone with Bipolar, IBS, GERDS, lymphadema, and osteo-arthritis could get a response on her medical assistance application from the county. It does hurt the morale.

7:15 a.m. Triggers

One of the things I've begun to worry about is the possibility of a downward trend. The more I've gone over my past in my mind, trying to find the truth of my diagnosis, the more I've seen trends. Example? I get the Runaways in spring and fall. And my triggers tend to be major life events: going to college, switching my major, leaving college, getting married, moving, new jobs, buying a house, leaving graduate school, moving out of state, separating from my ex, beginning a new life with a new boyfriend, my father's illness, death, loss of a job.

Jb and I move in one week. Moving is always stressful for me, especially now when my motivation is low, and it seems a monumental task to get all of our junk into boxes and out of here. I'm worried it'll trigger something, send me up into a hypomania, where I couldn't be more thrilled with our new place, everything is wonderful, everything is fabulous! Or it could send me down into depression, where everything is new, everything needs to be learned over. There's no nearby store I can walk to, all the bus routes are different, a less than easy commute to the metro, everything is strange, and there I'll sit, without a job, without t.v. or internet for days because Comcast screwed up, surrounded by boxes I've no idea what to do with.

I think I'll be thrilled at first, a new start, a fresh apartment: hardware floors, white light coming from three windows, a bright new world. And no one loves a fresh start like me. I feel the need for them periodically, a sudden irrepressible urge to pack it all up, throw it all in, and start over, as if I could outrun my problems, my moods, my responsibility. Build a new life, rebuild myself, find my better self, one who doesn't screw up, one who doesn't mess things up. A better relationship, a better me, a better, brighter look on life. Like Annie Gallup says, "Anything Is Possible (Reprise):"

It was a phone booth in the middle of the Midwest
It was raining like the devil. I was depressed
I watched a pickup truck slowly float by with its hazards blinking
Windshield wipers slapping, I said, "I keep thinking
If I can hold it all together just one day maybe two
It'll all make sense and I'll believe it's really true
I wish I could take comfort in steady slow improving
But I'm scared most of the time. I don't feel safe
Unless I'm moving"
Ooh, yeah, anything is possible

Too much of that rings home: "I keep thinking: if I could hold it all together, just one day, maybe two. It'll all make sense, and I'll believe it's really true. I wish I could take comfort in this steady slow improving, but I'm scared most of the time. I don't feel safe, unless I'm moving." That's the depression, the Runaways, and my frustration with the long haul of recovery and meds. It's all there in one verse. And I don't know why, suddenly, my head is full of verses and lyrics, poems and lines. I've read in a couple of blogs that bipolar patients seems caught up in music, poems, latching onto lines the way they latch onto sanity, repeating things over and over in their mind. When I began this blog, all I could think about was Dorothy Parker's poem, "The Veteran:" "Inertia rides and riddles me," repeating that one line over and over. Inertia rides and riddles me, inertia rides and riddles me, inertia rides and riddles me. There's something compulsive in that, and something delusional in the way I put so much emotional investment into lyrics and lines, as if they could speak for me when I'm too befuddled to find the words myself.

10:48 a.m. Nada

Didn't feel like writing yesterday, which is... meh. First time in two weeks I haven't felt like writing, and I don't know if that's the first sign of a change in mood, or no. I know it's the one thing Marya Hornbacher notes in her book as a telltale sign, and I can verify that one of the ways I knew I was sick was that I couldn't read or write.

Before the hospitalization, I was a voracious reader, going through the used books my mother sent me like they were M&Ms. I could finish one in two days reading only on the train during my commute and at lunch. I'm a Writing Intensive English major with a Master's in Writing and a concentration in Teaching & Pedagogy, as well as Creative Nonfiction. I've worked in a library on and off for over five years. I've taught college level English Composition I, II, and III. I have a certificate in teaching Adult Literacy. I've been a tech writer and a non-profit public relations writer.

I am not the kind of person who does not read.

Writer's block, however, happens. But it's the depression that takes all desire to write away from me, and I've been too depressed for years to take up that task. My writing comes out strong when I'm hypomanic, riding the edge of energy and anger. But now, words come slow and dumb, and even this blog reads clunky to me. In the hospital, I thought, "What a good opportunity to write about something important, to do a bit of creative nonfiction," and maybe one day I will, but at the time, I couldn't even bother to ask for pencil and paper. We weren't allowed pens. And there was a sort of respected silence, as if we were all in jail, and you didn't dare ask why someone was in there, or if it was voluntary of involuntary.

This lack of desire to write, to have anything to say, nor to read... it worries me most. I've a box of books my mother sent me, and I haven't even cracked it open. I tell myself I don't have time for them with the move in the next week. But part of that is justification for not reading. My greatest secret pleasure has always been women's magazines, but even in the hospital, and even now, I can't flip through them and retain anything. The glossy pictures hold no interest for me, and the spicy headlines no longer make me flip, almost compulsively, to page 112.

Dorothy Parker has always been a poet I've been able to relate to in my moods, though, and often I find myself repeating bits of poetry, like a magpie who collects shiny strings of lyrics, poems, sayings. If it weren't for the last line of the poem, Ms. Parker might have been spot on in her "Symptom Recital:"

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the simplest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick. I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore:
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men.
I'm due to fall in love again.

There's no falling in love again, but the symptoms, those came from a women who knew what it meant to fantasize about suicide, to try it herself, someone who knew depression, and it shines clear as day in that poem. These days, like Parker herself, I can't help but feel that that my "world," as well as my words, "is but a bunch of tripe."